[SEMINARI] SEMINAR: Renaud Parentani

[German Rodrigo Garcia]

Quantum correlations in inflationary spectra and violation of Bell 
inequalities

Renaud Parentani
Universite' de Paris XI, Orsay
Wednesday, 14 of June of 2006     12:00 PM
Theoretical Physics Seminars room

Abstract

The inflationary scenario succesfully accounts for the observed properties 
of primordial density fluctuations in terms of amplification of vacuum 
fluctuations. In spite of the macroscopic character of the final 
amplitudes, we show that the standard inflationary distribution still 
exhibits inherently quantum mechanical correlations (which cannot be 
mimicked by any classical stochastic ensemble). We propose a Gedanken 
experiment for which certain Bell inequalities are violated. We then 
compute the effect of decoherence and show that the violation persists 
provided that the decoherence lies below a certain non-vanishing 
threshold. Finally, there exists a higher threshold above which no 
violation of any Bell inequalities can occur. In this case only the 
corresponding distributions can be interpreted as stochastic ensembles of 
classical fluctuations. (talk based on astro-ph/0510445)